Our Dhol Drums library contains over 5,100 samples and more than 100 articulations, played with sticks, mallets, brushes, hands, fingers, palms and more, all recorded in extraordinary detail in a close, dry studio setting. We deep sampled two professional Punjabi Dhol Drums for this library, each with distinct characteristics and tuning. These drums have animal hide bass heads (called “dagga”) and maylar treble heads (called “thili”). They dagga sides are tuned with a single heavy nylon rope, wound around the drum through steel rings. The thili heads are tuned with a series of steel lugs and rods, typical of most modern percussion.

We like to refer to the thili as “snare” and dagga as “bass”, since they sound and function in much the same way snare and bass drums are used in western music. Also, we don't like to do anything in the usual way, because we're a pack of weirdos. The thili sound ranges from that of roto-toms or smaller timables to nasty, abrasive, grainy and thrashing snare-like sounds, depending on the drum size, turning, mallet type, strike position and playing style. The dagga heads range from a bayan-like water drip to a taiko-like boom-crack. We beat the hell out of our Dhol, to push the sound as far as we could take it. For this deeper dry- and close-mic recorded collection, we used a wide variety of sticks, mallets, brushes and hand articulations, as well as unique tunings, to explore the widest possible range of sounds that these instrument were capable of. We recorded every single note with a full 10 round-robin variations and up to 14 velocity layers. The end-result is the deepest sampled Dhol in the history of sampling allowing you to make completely audio-realistic dhol grooves.

We sampled each articulation with up to 14 velocity layers and 10 round robin per note. For the hand articulations, we've also included a set of nearly 40 tabla-like bass bends from slow to fast with 10 round robin each. These bends are a unique contrast to the bends in our traditional Tablas library, producing a much deeper low end.

You'll also enjoy a set of special presets with pre-loaded custom convolution reverb impulses recreating different acoustic spaces. We've divided these patches into three main types, "all master" which includes all articulations, "combo hands" including all hand articulations and "combo mallets" which includes all mallet articulations. For each of these three articulation types we've included five separate patches each with a distinct convolution. These convolutions are "bunker", "garage", "hall", "stairwell" and "valley". This library was originally released by Tonehammer in 2010.